Navigator 3.0 seems to do partial requests for images... at least the
linux and irix versions do.
I love these little get-rich-quick schemes. There was another one I saw
that encoded all images as multipart/mixed documents so that when users
tried to Save them to disk they wouldn't work as expected (since most
graphics programs don't expect a mime document). They claimed to be
protecting your images from unauthorized use.
Dean
On Sun, 9 Feb 1997, Alexei Kosut wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Feb 1997, mjb@oneworld.owt.com wrote:
>
> > I have written a program which uses byte-range requests to
> > support resuming file downloads.
> >
> > The response header I'm seeing indicates your server is not
> > recognizing the instruction for byte-ranges.
> > (My program does work w/ Microsoft's web servers.)
> >
> > If you want to use it to test, my program is at:
> > http://www.headlightsw.com/
>
> You have not provided nearly enough information to diagnose this
> problem, if it is one. I suspect that you may be requesting byteranges
> for documents that do not support them; Apache sends an
> "Accept-Ranges: bytes" header with any entity that it will
> byteserve. Is it sending them for the documents you have tried?
>
> Apache implements byteranges exactly as specified in the HTTP/1.1
> specification, RFC 2068, which you can find
> http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/ - this support has been
> thoroughly tested, and works fine with other byterange applications,
> such as Adobe's PDF plugin for web browers (though it should be noted
> that Netscape Navigator does have a bug that prevented Apache from
> serving PDF files in a way Navigator could read - Apache 1.2b7 and
> later will contain a workaround for this, and Navigator 4.0b2 will
> contain a fix as well.)
>
> In addition, your docs seems rather self-serving and self-centered. The
> fact is, most FTP servers have had the capability to server partial
> files for years, wheras the capability was only recently introduced to
> HTTP, which explains your 'discovery' that more FTP servers support
> partial requests than HTTP.
>
> Additionally, your idea is far from new. Most respectable FTP clients
> (and by this I don't mean web browsers with built-in FTP browsers)
> have supported resuming file transfers for as long as *I* can
> remember, and even early beta versions of Netscape Navigator 2.0
> resumed image downloads using a partial request where possible; this
> feature was removed because Navigator's implementation of it had
> problems, and it was never re-instated (I assume Netscape had other things
> they had that took priority).
>
> In short, your product is not new, not novel, and not needed. If
> Apache really does have a bug, please give us specifics (not just
> "it's broken because it doesn't work with my program"), and we will
> fix it. However, I believe Apache works fine, and it is *your* program
> that is misbehaving.
>
> Thanks for using Apache!
>
> --
> ________________________________________________________________________
> Alexei Kosut <akosut@nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us> The Apache HTTP Server
> URL: http://www.nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us/~akosut/ http://www.apache.org/
>
>